Hartford CT’s Glitter Bug is the piano-driven indie pop outlet of singer-songwriter Ashley Turner. Last year, Glitter Bug released The Butterfly Effect EP, a promising debut filled with lo-fi pop songs that are sweet on the surface but reveal a deeper tone of melancholy and heartache underneath its singalong melodies.

Turner discusses the creation of The Butterfly Effect as the spontaneous and natural result of heartbreak and being lost in contemplation: “I wrote ‘Disasterpiece (The Butterfly Effect)’ when my world was spinning, about a week before I started recording… I kept running over the different ways things could have happened, a lot of what-ifs. As I ruminated, I really clung to the idea that something… the smallest bit of doubt or speculation could lead to a chain reaction– the idea that a flap of a butterfly’s wings can cause a tornado under the right circumstances. That’s exactly how I felt at the time; insignificant, small, and destructive.”

Listening to The Butterfly Effect, one can get a sense for this smallness in the wake of destructive heartbreak. While EP opener “Squirrel Song” is considerably sunnier than what follows, it helps that Turner is a confident singer who knows how to weave her voice with biting one-liners and strange extended metaphors. If “Squirrel Song” starts too full on twee, it’s sweetness is quickly balanced on “Sleeping With Spiders”: “it hurts to sleep alone / But waking up with bug bites is worse / Don’t tell me to look on the bright side / At least something wants to touch you.”

By “Disasterpiece (The Butterfly Effect)”, the lo-fi haze of the record hangs over Turner like a black cloud. One might wish that Turner’s voice was a teensy bit higher in the mix, but when her voice cuts through the atmospherics, its emotion is far more palpable and suggests, like the butterfly effect, that there will be something even stronger to come.